


Eskel & The Alleged Hirikka

by bruxabait



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game)
Genre: Eskel Needs a Hug (The Witcher), Gen, Mentioned Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Mentioned Lambert (The Witcher), Mentioned Vesemir (The Witcher), Pre-The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Sweet Eskel (The Witcher), The Skellige Isles (The Witcher), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Witcher Contracts, witcher crack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:14:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24714409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bruxabait/pseuds/bruxabait
Summary: While on the path in Skellige, Eskel comes across a notice for an unusual contract. Nonsense ensues.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 40





	Eskel & The Alleged Hirikka

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this as a one-shot for a friend of mine and ended up deciding to treat it like a fic. I hope you like it, Runa!

The unevenly cut scrap of parchment pinned to the notice board on the docks of Kaer Trolde harbour was soaked with rain and sea-spray. The ink had blurred and warped, smudged nearly to the point of illegibility. Clearly that particular notice had gone unanswered for some time, likely for the fact that it demanded a service which had not been requested in several hundred years: the killing of a hirikka.

Eskel cocked his scarred brow, flipping the notice over in case any postscript had been scrawled on the back, revealing it to be the work of a boredom-struck fisherman’s son, and not the jarl of Ard Skellig himself. But no such postscript existed, telling him that either this prankster didn’t want to be caught, or Crach an Craite truly believed that a hirikka had begun to make a habit of lurking near the keep and frightening the locals.

He pocketed the strange notice, gathered Scorpion’s reins into his palm, and gave a tug that the warhorse snorted at, to make his protest heard. The road to Kaer Trolde was not an easy one, winding unpredictably through the untamed wilds the Isles were famed for. In comparison to the well worn arteries of culture and commerce that crisscrossed the Continent, Skellige’s roads seemed pitiful deer-paths used only by monsters and the occasional hunting party sent out to vanquish some looming threat.

If in fact there was a hirikka roaming the green hills and blustery cliffs which sat adjacent to Kaer Trolde, Eskel would be among a sparse handful of living witchers who had seen one. If it was true, he would have a tale to tell when he made the journey home to winter at the School of the Wolf with Vesemir. And if it wasn’t, his fellow alumni of the Wolf School would mock him viciously, as they were fond of doing to one another over errors in judgement and good sense.

 _Nobody’s seen a hirikka in centuries,_ Eskel, in Lambert’s snickering jeer.

 _Some islander bash your head with a stone, bud?_ In Geralt’s calm, sonorous voice.

But if it was real… Oh, if it was real, they’d be drooling over every word of his embellished recollection, slavering at each syllable and urging him to just hurry up and tell the damn story.

So, against the voice of reason insisting to him that someone was pulling his leg, he vaulted up into his saddle, swinging one leg up and over the worn, studded black leather, and bumped his heels against Scorpion’s flanks to urge the Zerrikanian stallion forward, up the treacherous bluffs which posed the only way to Kaer Trolde that wouldn’t result in a broken neck.

At the edge of the path lay a sheer drop, crumbling bits of stone eroded over time slipping occasionally down a steep drop. When they reached the bottom, they joined decades worth of their predecessors, piled like haphazard cairns erected by hands long withered to ash, reduced to little more than rubble by the harsh winds rolling off the sea. With a snort, Eskel pondered how often he felt like one of those stones, balanced at the edge of the world, teetering, looking down at his end and the ends of those who had come before him.

Without meaning to, he took one gloved hand from the reins and raised it, reaching back over his shoulder to touch the hilt of his silver sword. The mark of his trade, the tool which so often betrayed his nature to the people he encountered without so much as a word from its bearer. The blade which had been stained time and again with the foul, stinking blood of necrophages, coated in the thick sap that flowed beneath the fibrous flesh of leshens. The blade whose edge had cleaved the flesh of more monsters than he cared to count, for nothing more than a few pitiful coppers. And for his efforts, he was met more often than not with coldness and contempt. He risked his neck wading into drowner nests, tracking corpse-eaters over battlefields strewn with the recently dead, claimed by the wars raging across the Continent.

How different were witchers, truly, from those soldiers? They lived and died fighting for the interests of the masses, so that they might live in blissful ignorance, oblivious to the horrors endured by the ones who stood between their cities, their towns, their homes and families, and the darkness beyond what meagre order they had managed to cull in a world ruled by chaos.

By all rights their world, the one where they raised their children, made their livelihoods, was not theirs at all, but that of the relicts who had dwelt there since long before humans had been torn by some stroke of luck from their old world, the world they broke beyond hope of repair.

He had been one of them, once, had lived among them and now found himself so far displaced from everything that humans considered human.

There were times when Eskel was glad of that. He had lived a longer life already than any ordinary man could dream of. He had seen the things they did to each other, and to the creatures they viewed as _other._ The elder races, and those creatures who had arrived after the Conjunction but who posed no threat to humankind. He had been a witness to things that made him grateful for the divide. The mutations witchers were subjected to as children were said to strip them of emotion, render them cool and calculating beings — but in Eskel’s experience, that was far from true. Perhaps something in their chemical makeup unlocked a heightened sense of empathy, of compassion for others. After all, most witchers knew the difference between a threat and a creature deserving of their mercy.

He could not say the same for humans.

Eskel was pulled from the enveloping tides of his own thoughts by the voice of a sentry to the clan an Craite positioned at the mouth of a long, narrow tunnel which burrowed through the stone innards of a mountain peak nestled before Kaer Trolde keep.

“What business have you with the an Craites, witcher?” The guard barked authoritatively, puffing out his chest beneath a cloth gambeson dyed in the an Craite colours.

“Here to talk with the jarl about a notice he posted.” Eskel answered, leaning back to fish through his saddlebag and withdraw the notice, holding it out to the stout, sour-faced sentry. He lacked the usual ruddy warmth adopted by Skelligers, but that hardly bothered Eskel. The man squinted meaningfully at the parchment in his hand, plainly struggling to make out the words. He grunted under his breath, mumbling as he read, making a show of verifying Eskel’s reason for approaching Kaer Trolde.

He either took his job very seriously, or he was just a prick.

The an Craite guardsman reached up to pass the notice back to Eskel, who tucked it into his saddlebag as the stout man held him under a scrutinizing gaze, his lips curled in disdain as he eyed the silver and steel swords on the baldric slung across the witcher’s chest.

“All looks to be in order.” He grunted after a long moment’s pause, the words hacked out as if he were spitting a curse. Eskel got the sense that if it were left up to the judgement of this man, he wouldn’t be permitted behind the walls of Kaer Trolde at all.

He didn’t deign to grace the portly guardsman with a reply, waiting in silence for the an Craite manning the gate to draw it up and let him through. He shifted uneasily astride Scorpion, with the weight of the first guard’s slimy gaze still resting like a leaden pressure in his chest.

As soon as the heavy wrought-iron lattice of Kaer Trolde’s gate had ascended past his shoulders, Eskel urged his mount forward, Scorpion’s hooves clicking in rhythm with his gait. Patches of sage-green lichen clung to the edges of each chipped flagstone, spongy with recently fallen snowmelt.

Kaer Trolde keep sat balanced at the edge of the mountainside, a wide bridge leading to the stronghold’s main entrance. Eskel glanced up at the battlements worn down over time by the sharp, whistling gales of the Isles. Spears bristled above them, hafts clutched in the hands of guards bundled in furs over their plate and mail, round wooden shields held against their chests. They were positioned several yards apart, all along the parapets like shining statues depicting the warriors of Skellige’s past, immortalized in dull iron and stone carven from the face of the mountain. Only the red and blonde of their beards and lank hair beneath horned helmets betrayed their sentience

Eskel dismounted just outside the yawning mouth of the keep, where glacial winds shrieked and died in a losing battle against hospitable warmth and the glow of torches held in goat-horn sconces.

Crach an Craite was descending several shallow steps from the dais which led into a foyer with vaulted ceilings swimming in shadow where the torches failed to illuminate. The jarl had his arms spread wide as though to invite an embrace, although they stood several metres apart, and had never had the pleasure of encountering one another prior to that very day.

“A witcher has graced my halls, eh? And one bearing the sigil of the Wolf School, no less! You must be a friend of the White Wolf, aye?”

Eskel nodded, a gesture which seemed to please Crach, whose features were flushed. Judging by the hour, his rosy complexion was likely thanks to a hearty amount of strong spirit.  
“Geralt and I have been friends a long time. Name’s Eskel. But I’ve come about the hirikka that’s been seen on your land, Crach. You know about that, or is the notice I found the work of a town jokester?”

All at once, any traces of mirth blooming in Crach’s expression wilted.

His jaw clenched, his face turned slack and pallid, and he inclined his head grimly. Eskel could smell the sharp acidity of sweat beginning to bead at the jarl’s temples.

Whether the creature prowling the cliffs near the keep was a hirikka or not, Crach an Craite truly believed it to be real. And he was _afraid_ of it.

“Aye, lad, that’s the long and short of it.” He swallowed, motioning for Eskel to follow him on into the heart of Kaer Trolde.

The witcher’s steps fell silently despite his heavy boots, softer even than Crach’s fur-lined slippers soled with seal-skin. Eskel had only been to the Skelligan Isles a handful of times before, and he had never had the honour of walking Kaer Trolde’s storied halls, nor meeting the an Craites. His previous journeys had taken him to the other Isles, to hunt sirens and drowners for modest sums pooled by the inhabitants of remote fishing villages, or to gather alchemical ingredients in short supply on the Continent. He had never imagined he would wind up taking a contract for a hirikka commissioned by the jarl of Ard Skellig himself.

“The beast,” Crach began, leading the way through periodic circles of firelight, and through the valleys of deep shadow that lay between them, into the stone passageways of the keep. “Was first spotted by three men, who in the night wandered up to the cliffs from the village. As they told it, they were stood at the edge of a bluff not a mile from my keep, looking out o’er the sea, when they turned about and saw it in the trees, this _hirikka_ of ours.”

Eskel hummed attentively, dilating his vertical pupils to enhance his vision in the low light, until they resembled a pair of almost-full moons. Usually the monsters that men thought they saw, especially ones seen late at night, were never what the contracts originally claimed they were. He had been hired to kill dragons that turned out to be giant lizards in the Korath desert, grave hags who turned out to be the wraiths of murdered women, poltergeists who turned out to be particularly mischievous lutins… There was no guarantee that what he was dealing with was _actually_ a hirikka at all — especially considering their rarity in recent years.

At the risk of offending the jarl, Eskel voiced a question he had felt compelled to ask from the very beginning.

“And you believed these men?”

Crach stroked his short, reddish beard with two calloused fingers. The circlet perched upon his brow glinted a dusty gold as he considered the witcher’s query.

“I know quite well that these… _particular_ men were more’n likely sloshed that night. But they came to me come the morn sober as monks and pale as the dead, lad. It’s wearisome to stand before men frightened out of their skins and tell them their fears are unfounded. To answer ye briefly, ’twas a man of mine who nailed up that notice, if only to assure a gaggle of stumblin’ drunks that something was being done to address their concerns,” He levelled his eyes on Eskel, and clapped the witcher companionably on the shoulder. “I was’nae expecting a professional to turn up on Ard Skellig anytime presently. So, witcher? Will ye take up the hunt? You’ll receive compensation for your trouble, of course.”

“Got no other work at the moment. And to tell you the truth, I’m interested to see where this’ll lead, Crach. I’ll track down your hirikka.”

“You have my thanks, Eskel, Freya keep you.”

“I’d like to speak to the men who saw the hirikka, ask them some questions about their night on the bluff. Got any idea where I might find them?”

Crach snorted, a laugh rumbling through his chest although Eskel could still feel the unease rolling off him in waves. “In the tavern, by my guess. But ye needn’t chase after drunks, Eskel. Stay and rest, tell me a few witcher’s tales if ye please. I’ll send someone down to fetch those sodden vagrants.”

The watery grey light of mid-afternoon in Skellige bled into a streaky red and orange sunset. From Kaer Trolde harbour, the hoarse shouts and roared instructions of tired old seamen faded as the docks emptied. Sailors and fishmongers, pilgrims and the vagrants Crach’s men sought out, all made their nightly procession into taverns and quiet thatch-roofed homes, depending on which struck their fancy.

Eskel accepted the jarl’s invitation to await their arrival in his company. Crach filled the time with questions concerning his witcher training, what Geralt was like as a boy, recent contracts he had taken up… The jarl seemingly possessed a wealth of curiosity about a witcher’s trade, and Eskel graciously indulged him in his eager asking. There were less pleasant ways to pass time than drinking and trading stories. Tracking down elusive drunkards came to mind as one such example.

When his man tasked with finding their witnesses returned, Crach was deeply entrenched in regaling his drinking companion with tales of past raids on Nilfgaard — particularly the ones which had bestowed upon him his title of _Tirth ys Muire,_ or ‘The Wild Boar of the Sea’.

“Oh, aye!” He insisted, although Eskel had not contested the truth of his rambling. “Nilfgaardian mammies, they use me as a right terrifying bedtime story to whip their unruly whelps into shape!” His raucous laughter filled the great room, drifting up from a laden table to bounce cheerily about among the heavy wood beams above them. The witcher never thought he’d see a man so content to be the subject of little children’s nightmares.

“Jarl Crach,” Cut in a startlingly melodious voice belonging to Crach’s warrior, who certainly should have considered entering the profession of a minstrel, should he ever find the life of a fighting man unsatisfactory. “I bring to you Njal, Torsten, and Svende, them as saw the creature.” Crach’s man then stooped into an awkward bow, turned on his heel, and took his leave of the hall.

The trio lined up beneath the door’s wide oak lintel. They all looked more or less terrified to be in the position they were. They shifted and fidgeted, mutually concerned that inebriated actions they couldn’t remember had finally come back to bite them in the arse.

“Quit your fretting, urchins. My friend here is a witcher, come to look into the devil the three of ye happened upon those weeks ago. He’d like to ask questions, t’get a better sense of what he’s up against, ye ken?”

The tallest of them, who had been introduced as Torsten, nodded tremblingly, a few strands of grimy blond hair flopping onto his forehead as he did. He looked to be perhaps the most timid of the three, in spite of his hulking build and formidably threatening countenance. A tattoo taking the shape of curling vines spiralled its way from the shaved side of his head, down his temple, and ended just short of his chin.

Njal was the first to pipe up, reaching well above his own head to place a hand reassuringly on Torsten’s shoulder. “So’s ask us then, witcher.” He said. His voice was foul, squawking and shrill.

Eskel was sure he didn’t want to hear another word out of Njal’s mouth, so he obliged the demand readily.

“The creature you saw in the trees, I need you to describe it for me, in detail if you can. Anything that stood out to you, anything you noticed about it.”

Svende swallowed thickly, his gulp audible in the silence that followed Eskel’s request. “’Twas ‘uge, master witcher… We turned t’head back down the hill, an’ it was there. Had big, glowin’ eyes, yellower’n yours, like sulphur. And it walked on its hind legs, how a werewolf—”

“Horseshit!” Torsten bellowed, his former shyness cured by the heat of his protest. “It didn’t walk on _two_ bloody legs! It was on all fours, ye thick bastard!”

Across the scuffed surface of the table from Eskel, Crach cradled his forehead in the palm of his hand, his eyes squeezed tightly shut as the trio of men bickered back and forth in the manner of insolent children.

“Its eyes weren’t yellow either, they’s was _white_ , bright white, the way the frosts are white, almost blindin’, like.” Continued Torsten, paying no mind to the dissent of his friends.

Svende snorted. “Ye’ve pure made that up, ye whoreson.”

Before anyone else could get a word in, Crach slammed his closed fist down onto the smooth timber of the long table which dominated the great hall. Plates and goblets rattled as they startled with the force of his blow, and then stilled again, wine sloshing and cutlery clattering. A small ceramic jug of raspberry juice had been knocked on its side, the contents spreading outwards in a pool of fragrant vermilion. A lake of blood seeping into the wood-grain. Crach didn’t seem at all bothered by the possibility of staining. When one regularly hosted large gatherings of rowdy Skelligers, stained tables and spilled drinks probably ceased to be thought of as household horrors. The jarl’s efforts were better spent on preventing his guests from gutting one another, Eskel suspected.

“Enough,” By the time Crach spoke, the room had fallen quiet of its own accord. Svende delivered a swift elbow to Torsten’s ribs, but no more roughhousing occurred besides the fact. The jarl’s voice was not a roar, but a soft, commanding growl. “Be silent. One at a bloody time, ye curs.”

Eskel couldn’t help the edge of a smile when it came tugging at the unscarred edge of his mouth. He watched the three drunks, three grown men, apologize under their breaths and scuff their boots against the floor sheepishly. The witcher’s arms were folded over his chest, fingertips drumming forearms as he awaited Crach’s permission to speak one more.

An Craite had the disruptive trio pinned like gnats beneath his sharp, ice-pale gaze. A threat lay coiled beneath that look, a poised adder waiting to be trod on by one of these bumbling dolts. None of them were willing draw its ire, instead shuffling in uncomfortable silence and awaiting the relief of Eskel’s continued interrogation, as it would signal the end of Crach’s fury.

“Go on, witcher.”

Eskel, who had elected to stand upon the arrival of his witnesses, leant casually back against the edge of the table, one ankle crossed over the other. If he was going to make any headway in this contract, he would need to delineate the common threads in wildly varying stories. He would need to look past the surface, where their recollection of the night and of the beast were muddled and unclear, a confusion of ripples incapable of communicating any truth whatsoever. So long as the three men held conflicting opinions, he couldn’t be certain of anything.

“I need the three of you to come to an agreement on what you saw. Without an idea of what this creature was, whether it’s really a hirikka, my chances of killing, even finding it, are slim. Talk fast. I’d like to hit the ground running here.”

The three men talked amongst themselves for several minutes, each taking time to object to every point made by the other two, and to craft nonsensical insults spat with venomous intent.  
Eskel used that time to pick at the remains of a seared cod while Crach raised the edge of a silver tankard to his lips and drank deeply, before he leant back in his chair, its joints creaking as the jarl’s weight shifted.

“Master witcher,” Njal said in his slimy little voice. His friends seemed for the most part content to him speak for them. Even drunken idiots, it seemed, were capable of pulling themselves together with adequate motivation, in this case the perilous venture of angering their more than gracious jarl. “We’ve sorted out the details of the evenin’ in question.”

 _About fucking time,_ Eskel thought. He said, “Talk, then.”

Njal cleared his throat, the rumble of his phlegmy voice enough to turn even a witcher’s disciplined stomach. “The beast trod on four legs, an’ it had yellow eyes. The lot of us remember its fur bein’ thin in the places where there was any at all, like it had got mange. An’ it made a sound like a… A _yowlin’,_ master witcher, ungodly, like.” The short man’s tone was somber, as though he were recalling something that pained him greatly.

“One more thing…” Eskel said. One detail had been bothering him more than all the rest. These men claimed they had seen a hirikka. That was all well and good — they could believe what they wished to. But the chances of seeing a hirikka were nearly infinitesimal. Two hundred years ago, Eskel’s predecessors had hunted the creatures to the brink of extinction. They were hardly more than legends at present, much akin to dragons. There were tales, of course, ballads and indulgent poems elucidating the death of the last hirikka, by the cruel silver blade belonging to a witcher of old. “How can you be certain that what you saw was a hirikka?”

Svende’s bluish lips pressed into a thin, hard line. “My mam, she told me stories when I’s was just a young pup. ‘Bout a devil, a hirikka, who’d come down from the peaks at night, an’ steal little children from their beds afore they’s could so much as shout. This beast, the one was starin’ at us up on the bluff, it looked just how she said the hirikka did.”

“She tell you all that to scare you straight, make you listen to her?”

“Oh nae, master. Always told me it didn’t _matter_ how sweet a child was, or how good. If the hirikka decided it wanted one of ‘em, it crept into the village and didn’t flee till it had its chosen bairn to bring back to its lair an’ eat.”

_Charming woman._

“Huh. That all you wanna tell me? Did it attack?”

“Nae, only looked at us from afar. Lifted not a paw t’come any nearer.”

“How far were you from the keep, exactly?”

Svende opened his mouth to speak, and then shut it and frowned meaningfully, his brows pinching together in mute befuddlement.

Njal spoke, in that slinking way that Eskel could not stand. “Couldn’t ‘ave been more than a league off from the keep, master witcher. At the second outcropping, one what ends in a sheer drop to the stones pricklin’ up from a little cove. Wrecked many a ship, that spot. Hulls an’ shattered oars still floatin’ about if ye look over the edge.”

Eskel hummed, only half listening to the drunkard’s voice. Shipwrecks weren’t pertinent to the task he had been hired to carry out. The witcher already detested travelling by boat — he wasn’t keen on pondering the number of vessels that were smashed to splinters each day against the stony shores of Ard Skellig. Work was usually never in short supply on the Isles, and so he thought it worth braving the nausea and dizziness that seafaring exacted on him. He shook those thoughts away, beginning to feel sick at the mere mention of smashed ships.

The hirikka had only been seen once, at night. Eskel reckoned that his best hope of encountering it would be to wait until nightfall and then make the journey up to the cliffs near Kaer Trolde where the drunks had sighted their beast. The texts describing the near-eradication of hirikkas two-odd centuries ago gave no insight on which elixirs and oils were effective against such a creature. They had apparently been quite certain that none of their students or their students’ students, would ever cross paths with a hirikka. The overconfidence of those long-dead witchers had left Eskel at a disadvantage.

He found himself wishing that Vesemir were there. The old man had scoured every bestiary entry a thousand times over, read every dusty tome in Kaer Morhen’s library, and had the most experience under his belt out of all the witchers Eskel had ever met. If anyone alive knew the weaknesses of a hirikka, it would have been his teacher. But as it stood, Vesemir was an ocean away, across the Continent in Kaedwen, and Eskel was not keen on another trip across the ocean in the name of an only slightly lower chance of being disemboweled, should he frighten the creature before he has a chance to convince it to move deeper into the Skelligan wilds, for its own good.

The witcher turned shining amber eyes on Crach an Craite, his neck craned to look over his shoulder at the jarl. If he was to find the hirikka tonight, he had only until morning. Seeing as he was uncertain which blade oil would have been most effective, and hoping that he could speak to the hirikka instead of killing it, he thought it best to use only his reserves of Swallow and Thunderbolt, as well as the single vial of Cat left over from his last contract, which had led him into an unpleasant system of lightless sea-caves beneath Spikeroog.

If worst came to worst, he could rely on his signs to keep the hirikka at bay.

“Think that’s all the help I need, Crach. Sun’s already gone, so I’ll make my way out to the cliffs. Hopefully by the morning I’ll have found our hirikka.”

Crach inclined his head, and swept his arm in a broad gesture which bade the three drunks out of his sight. A gesture which, reluctantly, they obeyed.

“Aye, lad. May Freya’s light guide your way.”

Eskel hastily departed Kaer Trolde after giving Crach his thanks. The jarl had been under no obligation to host an unknown witcher at his table, in his hall, and yet he had done just that. A kindness for which said witcher felt inclined to express his gratitude. He slung his baldric back over his shoulders and adjusted the flat leather strap carefully, then tilted back his head to down his last vial of the Cat potion as he stepped out of Kaer Trolde’s dim warmth into the numbing cold of Ard Skellig.

At this altitude the winds ached in a man’s ears within minutes, resulting in a dull, lasting headache which he had yet to grow accustomed to. Above shrieking gales clawing rabidly at his clothing and skin, a woman’s voice called out for someone else, hoarse from shouting to be heard over the fury of Skellige’s warrior gods. She paced along the stone, skirts and flapping apron gathered in small hands reddened by the cold. Her nose was pink and her eyes glassy with desperate tears. A kitchen girl, her clothing spattered with dishwater and fingertips stained from chopping beetroots for winter stews.

The moment she caught sight of him, through a confusion of stinging snowflakes, she ran alongside the parapets, heavy skirts churning around her ankles, all the while pleading with him to wait, to wait just a moment. Her small, round face was ruddy and flushed, small snowflakes ensnared in dense chestnut curls. Her freezing hands darted out to take hold of Eskel’s elbow. She was crying, and probably had been for some time, judging by the puffiness beneath her eyes. It came as a shock to him that her tears were not freezing to her cheeks. When she drew close enough to make out the mutilated left side of his face, the deep and uneven scarring left there by his child-surprise, he saw disgust and fear flash for a moment across her eyes. She masked it better than most. But it was still there.

“You’re the witcher, aren’t ye? Yrsa, my cat, got out of the keep some time ago, master witcher, an’ these snows’ll freeze her if she hasn’t been killed already… Please, if ye see her, bring Yrsa back t’me.”

Her grasp on his arm was icy and sharp, the little crescents of her fingernails digging into the fabric of his gambeson.

“I’ll keep an eye out, but I’m not promising anything. Storm’s been bad for a while now. If she’s smart, chances are she’ll be hiding somewhere close by.”

He tugged his arm free of the young woman’s hands as gently as he was able, and kept walking over the bridge leading to the black chasm of the tunnel. The only way in or out of Kaer Trolde. When he glanced back over his shoulder, between the gleaming hilts of his swords, he expected the girl to be gone, to have rushed back inside the keep in order to warm her tremulous bones. Instead, she stood with her hands clasped together in front of her, dark hair billowing across pale, dainty features and obscuring her eyes from his sight. Moving subtly beneath new snow’s crisp, sharp odour he could still smell the bitter salt of her sorrow.

The scent of ammonia became overwhelming by the time he had trekked halfway up the hill preceding the second bluff. The scent, pungent and thick, was unusual in Skellige’s open, airy landscape. The trees pressed close and claustrophobic at either side of a thin but steadily widening footpath. The snows had let up in the time it had taken him to navigate his way cautiously up from the village. He’d left Scorpion at the foot of the hill, untethered.

Eskel’s heightened sense of hearing gave away none of the telltale rustlings and chatter which usually hummed busily in deep forests. What humans were capable of perceiving and the true activities of wooded areas were two very different things. An ordinary man wandering Ard Skellig’s forests could only hear and see the glaringly obvious. A deer picking its way through rampant underbrush, the butcher-birds calling through shaded canopies. To Eskel, to any witcher, each living forest had a voice, clear and deliberate and unlike the voice of any other in the world. In primeval groves leshens communicated silently with their wolves and ravens, only the creaking of ancient trees giving away their presence. In young forests full of saplings and new growth, vines darted brightly up thin trunks and rodents made their nests in soft soil. But the forest Eskel walked through now had no voice.

Aside from the stirring of leaves in a breeze soft and merciful compared to the earlier evening’s gales, Eskel could not pick out any sound at all. The mice and rabbits native to Skellige seemed to have abandoned this place, moved their young somewhere else. The shrikes had left with them, after finding their diet of young mice and lizards too sparse. All that remained was the sharp scent of ammonia and deep, lengthy scratches lining the bark of sap-sticky pines.

For all the lack of small game, neither were there any signs of something as large as a hirikka prowling the area.

Eskel crouched down, lowering his hand to brush leaf rot away from a paw-print no bigger than a Redanian copper. The lasting mark of a creature bound for less dangerous ground, perhaps? But by the definition of its imprint in the black mud beneath a thin dusting of frost, it could be no more than a few hours old. Whatever little beast had made the track had only recently left the clearing at the cliff’s edge.

After another half hour of searching for indicators of a monster he seemed predestined not to find, and no new leads pointing him in any one direction, Eskel was beginning to suspect that he had been sent out not to find a hirikka at all, but a blue herring. Night had fallen over the waves as they lapped and gathered in roiling eddies at the foot of the bluff. He leant out over the edge to look down for a moment, listening carefully for any movement behind him as he did so. Whatever might occupy this place was clearly not there presently, and dawn was still hours away. The idea of roaming the side of the hill in search of the beast he was charged with removing was not a pleasant one to him. Instead he opted to wait a while in the hopes that the creature would reveal itself upon seeing that he was not actively seeking it out.

He laid his swords down within arm’s reach beside him and knelt, his knees compressing a layer of dead leaves and fallen needles. Eskel’s eyes flared brightly in the dark, their faint amber glow extinguished as he shut them. He found it important, even imperative, to meditate before a fight. In doing so he sharpened his senses, honed his mind and his body to a razor’s edge. This particular contract inspired apprehension in him. He knew of only one way to stave off that disquiet: allowing calmness to flow over him like water. To give himself up to a state of unalloyed existence in which nothing else was tangible to him beyond the borders of his own consciousness.

Time flowed differently in such a condition. Eskel could not have known whether he knelt in that clearing for minutes or for days. He simply waited, motionless, the shallow sigh of a sea breeze whispering like a lover in his ear. The pines fringing the clearing in which he sat were still as well. They skirted the jutting edge of the cliff in a broad semicircle, a bare stretch of ragged grass sprawling between the witcher and the treeline.

And then, all once, _nothing_ was still.

The world seemed to rock on its axis. A brittle leaf cracked beneath the weight of something moving softly over the forest floor, crouched among concealing brush. Eskel exploded into motion, the silence and smooth tranquility of his meditation broken by something as imperceptible as a single dry _crack_ reporting hollowly in his ears. In the fraction of an instant between breaths his sword’s edge flashed in the dark winter air, hissing as it left its sheath. The witcher sprung to his feet, flecks of mud mottling the knees of his trousers. At the edge of the clearing, pressed low to the ground, the luminous sulphur-yellow eyes fixed on him, two pale torches against the stark black streaks of tree trunks. A low, bestial growl unfurled in a seething tide toward the witcher, the sound drawing out into the wailing yowl that Njal had described.

Eskel could feel the elixir he had drank prior to his meditation taking effect, the searing strength of Thunderbolt burning in his veins. He had achieved a perfect equilibrium, his body a finely tuned instrument awaiting his instruction. He was braced for battle.

Upon closer inspection the creature stalking him, however, was far too small to have been a hirikka. A gaunt, hairless face peered out from the undergrowth, distinctly feline in shape.

A cat. An ordinary cat, aside from the fact that its round body was entirely hairless, its face wrinkled menacingly. It was the ugliest cat Eskel had ever seen, but still just a cat.

_A fucking cat._

The creature hissed at him, lashing its rat-like tail against the weeds clustered around it. Eskel took hold of the pink skin between its shoulder blades and lifted it up to his eye level. He ignored the cat’s attempt to take a swipe at his face, claws extended although they had been blunted on tree bark.

“Go ahead, you little asshole. Somebody else already beat you to the punch.” He said.

Eskel supposed that it wasn’t improbable for a bunch of sailors stumbling blind drunk through the woods to mistake an ugly, mean cat who’d gotten fat off kitchen scraps for a creature out of legend. Something told him he should have known better than to think any of those imbeciles had the clarity of mind to remember anything true from the night that existed in infamy to them.

He heaved a heavy sigh, shaking his head as he sheathed his sword again. The cat’s fury subsided as he adjusted its cold body in his arms, tucking it close to his chest as he leant over to picked up the baldric with his steel sword still attached to it. The cat must have gotten lost or wandered up to the cliffs after it escaped Kaer Trolde. With enough mice and birds to hunt it had not lacked food, and it had apparently begun to think of this area as its own. The strong smell of ammonia that had stung his eyes when he first made his way up the hill had been the result of the cat’s marking. How Njal, Torsten and Svende had mistaken a cat weighing no more than one stone for a beast as massive as a hirikka he had not a clue. Eskel thought he ought to have asked them where they bought their spirit — clearly it was pretty damned potent stuff.

“You must be Yrsa, hm?” He said to the cat curled tightly against his chest. She answered him with a sound halfway between a growl and a rattling purr, and Eskel took that as confirmation enough.

The sun had begun its gradual ascent by the time Eskel arrived back at the gates of Kaer Trolde. The sliver of brilliance visible above the battlements was near enough to blind him as he rode over the bridge, raising an arm to shield his eyes.

Yrsa had fallen asleep where he held her against the fabric of his gambeson. He had wrapped the black cloak he donned occasionally when travelling in harsh weather around her. The cat was breathing soft and shallow against his chest, tiny huffs leaving her pink nose with each lulled exhale.

Crach an Craite stood outside the shelter of his stronghold’s open foyer, a heavy wolf skin draped across his shoulders. A sentry must have gone to inform him of Eskel’s return before he had passed through the gate. Crach’s stony expression splintered only slightly at the realization that no trophy hung from Eskel’s saddle, no bloody token of his victory.

Eskel dismounted carefully so as not to startle his sleeping hirikka.

“Where’s the beast, lad? Ye’ve come back to me empty-handed?”

Eskel shook his head, pulling back the edge of the cloak-wrapped bundle to reveal a disproportionately large, bald pair of ears and the edge of one half-open yellow eye bleary with fading sleep. “Here’s your beast, Crach.”

The jarl scoffed his disconcertion. _"A cat?"_

“ _Your_ cat, actually. She got out of the kitchen weeks ago, ended up claiming the cliffs as her own. What your three drunken sailors thought to be a hirikka was actually just an escaped kitchen cat.”

“Good-for-nothin’ whoresons…” Crach muttered, taking the bundle of fabric containing their culprit from Eskel. He cradled it like an infant, cursing vibrantly under his breath.

“Ehh… Thank you, master witcher. I’m sure this’ll come as a relief to the kitchen girls. I’ll arrange for your reward, though I’ll not be payin’ ye near as much as I would for a hirikka’s head, aye?"

Eskel was no longer eager to tell Geralt and Lambert about any of this.

The witcher smiled, a nearly imperceptible twitch crooking the corner of his mouth upward.

“Seems only fair.”


End file.
